Origins

by A D Starrling

  ‘Now what?’ muttered Hosanna as they stood gazing at the final remains of the Immortal kings.

  ‘We tell their stories,’ said Navia. She indicated the walls around them and the pile of bare parchment lying inside a stone box she had carved. ‘The story of Romerus, the one descended from the first man and woman who walked this Earth, and his Immortal sons, Crovir and Bastian.’

  Jared’s eyes widened. The others shared surprised glances.

  ‘What do you mean, the first man and woman who walked this Earth?’ said Mila.

  Navia’s expression turned sad as she studied her cousin. Then she took a deep breath and started to speak.

  She told them of the dreams and visions she had been having since the kings’ deaths, of a history defined by the heavenly origins of mankind and the mysterious cures Romerus had received in the desert all those hundreds of years past. She told them of a future that would be wreathed in darkness for hundreds of years still to come, of devious deeds and twisted plots both man and Immortal made, of conflicts that would be a scourge upon this world for countless generations.

  ‘You mean, even after all we have suffered, our children’s children will go to war with one another?’ Hosanna whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ said Navia. ‘For there are many among them who will revere Bastian and Crovir, and who will always blame the younger king for the death of the older one.’

  They listened, faces pale with anguish, struggling to grasp her uncompromising predictions as she continued to talk of the war that would tear the descendants of Bastian and Crovir apart, and the plague that would finally bring it to a close. Only Mila seemed somewhat unsurprised by the Seer’s words, her eyes cool, as if she expected no less of men and Immortals alike.

  Finally, when all hope seemed to be lost and the agony of what was to be their legacy weighed down heavily upon them, Navia smiled tremulously and told them about the marked ones who would come after them, the descendants who would inherit their powers and more. They who would be mankind and the Immortals’ hope for a way out of the shadows ahead.

  Jared’s heart slammed against his ribs in the stunned silence that greeted her final words. ‘You mean, our souls will be reborn?’

  Navia dipped her chin. ‘In a sense, yes. A piece of the souls of those descended of a union between a son and a daughter of Romerus will be reborn again.’ She crossed the floor and pressed a hand against Jared’s chest. ‘Those who will come after us will not remember who they were in this life. Although our children and their children will manifest our abilities to some extent, a part of us will only come to exist once more inside the hearts of the ones who will be the true beneficiaries of our gifts.’

  Jared swallowed convulsively.

  They spent another Half Moon capturing the stories of Romerus and the dead kings in script form on the stone walls of the second cave, creating a beautiful, circular tapestry that told the tale of the Empire’s rise and ultimate fall.

  On the scrolls the Seer had carefully prepared, they inscribed their own narratives, the stories of twelve Immortal princes and princesses and their unique skills, Mila penning Kronos’s story as well as her own. These they left inside the smaller stone box, which they placed between their fathers’ tombs.

  On their last day in the desert, Navia removed two chunks of gold from her saddle and asked Jared to fashion a seal for each tomb in the design she sketched in the sand, the sun encircling the middle of a cross. Before he closed off the access to the smaller cave, Navia herself engraved the marks that the ones who would inherit their ungodly powers and pieces of their souls would bear from birth.

  To Mila’s consternation, she carved out a giant trident dagger in the space between the pillars that held the hearts of Crovir and Bastian.

  ‘Why?’ Mila murmured, grief filling her.

  Navia took her hand and squeezed her fingers. ‘Because just as you are the most powerful of all of us, so will your heir be the most formidable of our scions. And this is the mark she will bear.’

  They left the mountains after Jared secured the coffins’ lids and sealed off the tunnel, heading into the desert as twilight claimed the world. From the oasis, they traveled north and crossed the West Sea to the Land of the Hatti.

  There they were to part ways, as Navia had told them they should, some to venture east while others veered north and west. Though separation would not prevent the future war between their descendants, it would delay it for as long as possible. On the last evening they spent together, they feasted and cried and drank late into the night while their children slept around them.

  In the morning, as they embraced each other for the final time, Navia bestowed the seal to Crovir’s tomb to Baruch and the seal to Bastian’s tomb to Tobias.

  Then, while Beatrix and Malachi watched on with melancholic expressions, Navia walked up to Jared and raised her hands lovingly to his face. With tears glistening in their eyes, they shared their first and last kiss.

  Epilogue

  Days soon turned to months and months to years. As the sun and the moon rose and set on hundreds more, the children of the original Immortal princes and princesses settled in cities once ruled by the defunct Immortal empire, their identities and origins a carefully kept secret from the humans around them. Their lineage rapidly grew and spread itself across the world, their children and their children’s children bearing their own offspring and casting them to the four winds.

  Many became nobles in mortal societies and the Immortal ones that soon flourished in the shadows, their wealth and power growing during their long-lived existences.

  It was later that rumors of beings who could survive death started to emerge, giving birth to the wildest of fables. As once-forgotten tales of Immortals spread across humanity and were retold over and over again to generations that followed, their existence became enshrined in myths that would continue to fascinate mankind for thousands of years to come, and give rise to strange alchemy that promised to deliver a cure for death itself.

  Among the epics that evolved was one that was not so much fable as it was truth. A tale of a woman who came to be revered and feared in equal measure, a warrior who fought with two trident blades, her quest to protect and guide humanity taking her to all corners of the world. A goddess whose legend was engraved into some of mankind’s most sacred religious texts.

  Around the time that whispers started of a war brewing between those who called themselves members of the Bastian race and those who claimed to belong to Crovir’s lineage, on a hill in a cold land populated by hundreds of lakes, an old woman climbed the snow-covered slopes to a tree that had long since shed its leaves.

  In the large residence that straddled the land below, a young woman stood by the window and gazed at the gibbous moon that bathed the world in an eerie light.

  ‘Should we not go with her?’ she murmured, staring at the hillside.

  Her great-grandmother came to stand beside her.

  ‘No, child,’ said Eleaza. ‘This time is for my mother and her alone.’

  Tears glimmered in the eyes of the young woman. Behind them, the extended family that had gathered to say their goodbyes wept quietly.

  Eleaza smiled and glanced at Kaleb where he sat at a table, his face dark with grief.

  ‘Do not be sad,’ she told her great-grandchild. ‘She is not. For she shall soon be with the one she has been waiting to join for over a millennium now.’ She turned to stare out of the window, her eyes just about making out the shape of her mother sitting under the tree high above them. ‘I wish that you too could one day find a love as great as theirs.’

  The warrior watched the stars shimmer above her, her heart at peace and her soul content for the first time in a long time. Just as she did every day, she closed her eyes and brought the sound of his heartbeat to mind for the last time, along with the heat of his body and the feel of their final kiss.

  Mila smiled. ‘Wait for me, Aäron.’

  Crows darkened the heavens above the hi
ll. They landed in the tree and crowded the snow-covered ground beneath it, blacker than black, blotting out all whiteness. Their shapes blurred as Eleaza’s tears finally spilled over and stained her cheeks. She wiped them and watched all the way to the end, until the last bird leapt into the night and disappeared with the flock that faded fast in the direction of the moon.

  In another land to the north and east, in a city built inside a vast cavern under ice-covered mountains, an Immortal with a missing hand gazed upon his hundreds of offspring, children born of human women he had mated with over centuries, and the children who came after them.

  Fire filled his soul as he thought of all that he would accomplish through them to regain what was once lost, to retake a world that was rightfully his as an Immortal prince, to bring back dead kings and gods.

  ‘I shall name you…Kronos,’ he murmured to the assembled mass.

  And they bowed before him, pledging their eternal alliance to his cause.

  In the Kingdom of Heaven, the Archangel watched as the Immortal War began and darkness spread across the Earth. And he waited.

  For the wheels of fate to turn.

  For souls to be reborn.

  For the destiny of mankind and those who could guide them to the path of redemption to unfold.

  THE END

  Family Tree II

  The Reborn Souls

  Mila - Alexa King

  Aäron - Zachary Jackson

  Tobias and Baruch - Lucas Soul

  Jared - Ethan Storm

  Navia - Olivia Ashkarov

  Rafael - Conrad Greene

  Thank You

  Thank you for reading ORIGINS.

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  Acknowledgments

  To Glendon Haddix of Streetlight Graphics. Thank you for the awesome cover.

  To my editor Sara Litchfield and my assistant Kate Tilton. Thanks for doing a great job on Origins. I know this one is your favorite!

  Facts and Fictions

  Now, for one of my favorite parts of writing my books. Here are the facts and fictions behind the story.

  Mesopotamia

  When I planned the novels of the Seventeen series, I knew the fifth book would be the origin story of the Immortals. While researching when and where to base the formidable empire they once ruled so as to meld it with the known factual history of the time, the 4th millennium BC and the birthplace of one of the most advanced, ancient human civilizations made logical sense.

  Mesopotamia was famed for being one of the earliest known ‘cradles’ of civilizations, the other two being the Levant and the Nile River Delta. It included the lands between and around the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates (known by their old Persian names of Tigra and Ufratü in Origins), in what is now modern East Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Kuwait, and saw mankind’s transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, the beginnings of agriculture, the invention of writing, architecture and animal husbandry, and the origins of a class-based human society.

  Of all the incredible kingdoms that took root in those fertile lands, from the Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Akkadian, and the later Persian and Parthian empires, one struck the deepest chord in me and formed the backbone of the human alliance that would rise against the Immortal kings in Origins and become the first human empire to lay claim to the throne of the fictional Uryl.

  That civilization was that of Sumer and the capital of the Immortal Empire, Uryl, is a play on the factual Uruk, a Sumerian city said to be the largest in the world at the time, and which was similarly situated on the banks of the Euphrates River. The other cities and garrisons of the mythical Immortal Empire are also based on factual Sumerian cities, as are those of its extended territories in Ancient Anatolia, the Aegean Sea, the Nile River Delta, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River, and the Levant.

  Gilgamesh

  For those of you with some knowledge of history and religion, Gilgamesh will not be an unfamiliar name. He was a Sumerian King thought by some to be a mythical demi-God and by others to be a true historical figure. His father was Lugaldanda, one of the Kings of Uruk, and his mother was Ninsun, a goddess descended of a sky god and a goddess of the Earth. Gilgamesh is the subject of a series of Sumerian poems entitled The Epic of Gilgamesh, on which many fictional stories, games, and comics have been based.

  While studying the Sumerian King list inscribed in a variety of archaeological artifacts recovered from Iraq, the oldest and most fascinating of all being the Weld-Blundell Prism in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, I fell in love with the story of Mesh-ki-ang-gasher, the founder of the First Dynasty of Uruk. Hence, I decided that Gilgamesh’s father, and the first king of the human empire that would follow the fall of the Immortals in Origins, would be Megash, and his mother would be Nisuna, a play on Ninsun. Although I never overtly addressed Megash and Nisuna’s relationship in Origins, I hope I hinted heavily enough to show that theirs was a marriage based on love, mutual respect and a deep attraction, with a large modicum of sexual humor, which often exasperated Megash’s fictional older brother Aäron.

  As for Gilgamesh, he is but a boy in Origins and I loved depicting him as an incredibly intelligent, solemn child whose relationship with Mila, the Immortal Warrior, would inspire him to accomplish the great deeds of his unparalleled future and establish him as a legend of his times.

  Time

  As you may have deduced from reading Origins, I carefully avoided using time references such as seconds, minutes, and hours in the story. It made for some convoluted writing while I tried to be as historically accurate as possible, by not using units that didn’t exist then.

  The Sumerians invented a sexagesimal system (a numeric system based on the number sixty) for counting time, angles, and distance. Why sixty? The common theory among historians is that people in those days used their thumb to count the three segments of the four fingers of one hand (making the total of segments twelve) and then multiplied it by the five fingers of the other hand (making that total sixty). Sixty and twelve became incredibly important numbers in the civilizations that followed, and the twelve lunar cycles and twelve constellations of the Zodiac all derive from the ancient Sumerian system of counting, as do the modern systems of calculating geographic coordinates.

  The Sumerian Calendar was a lunisolar one, based not only on counting on the human hand but also on the phases of the moon and the sun.

  A year was the time needed for the Earth to complete one orbit around the sun, and hence became known as a solar year. It was equivalent to 360 days or the 360 degrees of the sun’s ecliptic path through the celestial sphere.

  A month was the time needed for the moon to orbit the Earth, and hence became known as a lunar month. It was equivalent to thirty days and was further divided into four phases; the new moon, the first quarter/half moon, the full moon, and the last quarter/half moon. Each phase was thus roughly equivalent to seven days.

  The day was the duration of the Earth’s full rotation upon its own axis. Day and night were each further divided into twelve periods each, ranging from sunrise to sunset and sunset to sunrise. Hence, the first hour of the day would be around the modern 6am, whilst the first hour of the night would be around the modern 6pm
. Making the sixth hour of the day midday and the sixth hour of the night midnight.

  In Origins, I use years, months, full moon, new moon, half moon, days, and portions of days to denote time. The use of century and millennium did not come until the later Roman, Julian, and Gregorian Calendars. Fun fact: century is derived from centuria, the basic 100-man-strong fighting unit of the Roman Legion.

  Distance

  Just as counting time started out based on the human hand, so did the concept of distance, with the addition of barley and wheat in the mix. Yes – the grains. A grain formed the most basic unit of distance measurement in ancient Sumer and was equivalent to some 2.7mm. One finger was equivalent to six grains and a foot equivalent to twenty fingers.

  Since I did not want to be throwing grains and fingers all over this book, I opted to use feet and leagues instead, one league being equivalent to some three miles or the distance a man could walk in one hour.

  Inventions

  Most of the inventions of the first advanced human civilizations, particularly those of the Sumerians, I attributed to the Immortals.

  From the potter’s wheel to the chariot, from agricultural techniques such as mono-cropping and ploughing to methods of irrigation using shadoofs, canals and dykes, from animal domestication of mouflons (wild sheep), aurochs (wild cattle), and onagers (wild donkeys) to farming, from metallurgy and pottery to architecture and the building of Ziggurats, from writing to mathematics, from beer brewing to ice houses, from legal and administrative processes to advanced weapons and military formations and training – all were passed down from the Immortals to the Sumerians in Origins and form the primary reason why they ruled for so long and had such a long-lasting impact on the human civilizations that came after.